AWS Global Accelerator to boost performance across regions

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has lifted the lid off a handful of products and services ahead of its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, announcing on Monday night a network service that allows for the automatic routing of traffic to multiple regions.

The AWS Global Accelerator has been touted by VP of global infrastructure at AWS Peter DeSantis as improving availability and performance for AWS customers' end users.

Essentially, user traffic enters AWS Global Accelerator through the closest edge location. The accelerator then routes the user traffic to the closest healthy application endpoint within the global AWS network. Lastly, at the endpoint, the application response returns over the AWS global network and reaches the user through the optimal endpoint.

Users are directed to an AWS customers' workload based on their geographic location, application health, and weights that the AWS customer can configure.The new service also allocates static Anycast IP addresses.

In AWS Global Accelerator, customers are charged for each accelerator that is deployed and the amount of traffic in the dominant direction that flows through the accelerator. The company expects customers will typically set up one accelerator for each application, but more complex applications may require more than one.

Users will be charged a fixed hourly fee -- $0.025 -- for every accelerator that is running, over the standard Data Transfer rates.

The standard Data Transfer rates -- also called a Data Transfer-Premium fee (DT-Premium) -- is calculated every hour on the dominant direction of traffic, which could be inbound traffic to an application, or outbound traffic from an application to end users.

DT-Premium is charged at a rate per gigabyte of data transferred over the AWS network, and the cost is dependent on the AWS Region that serves the request and the AWS edge location.

AWS Global Accelerator is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).AWS TRANSIT GATEWAY

Also announced on Monday was the availability of the AWS Transit Gateway, touted by the company as the way to build a hub-and-spoke network topology.

DeSantis explained that users can connect existing VPCs, datacentres, remote offices, and remote gateways to a managed Transit Gateway, with full control over network routing and security.

According to AWS, it is a way to simplify network architecture, reduce operational overhead, and centrally manage external connectivity.

DeSantis said users can also use Transit Gateways to consolidate existing edge connectivity and route it through a single ingress/egress point.

Customers can attach up to 5,000 VPCs to each gateway and each attachment can handle up to 50 Gbits/second of bursty traffic, AWS said. AWS VPN connections can also be attached to a Transit Gateway, with Direct Connect planned for early next year.